So the fish market is moving. Maybe. There has been some talk, but nothing specific has happened this week, only stray notices here and there, people dusting off oft-used paeans to the dwindling manufacturing base, finding the most colorful anecdote they can, and you can practically hear the syrupy violin music accompanied by the long dissolve.
The reason it occurred to me was a recent afternoon reading Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (a good book, though such an arbitrary structure means the concept gets thin in places — a danger this site is acute aware of — and the word peripatetic is a little overused), which has a chapter on, yes, the Fulton Fish Market (replete with the ubiquitous Dave Pasternak, proprietor of Esca, and go-to figure when one wants a good pull quote on crudo). It’s as a good as any other, though somehow he missed the cigarette woman. Written four years ago, it takes a decidedly skeptic position on the likelihood of the relocation, which has been discussed, planned for, and even, at times, seemingly underway for most of the last century.
No longer dependent on the river as a source of inventory, the market succeeds for the same reasons any established business does: traditional, efficacy, and a presumption of superior quality, prices, and not wee bit of color. Oh, yes, and the mob. That always minimizes competition. The culture of these places gets confused in the external reading: middle class appropriated nostalgia and envy reduces the image we understand to cutouts and stereotypes. With every bland desk job in danger of shipment off to far away lands where they have better grammar and lower wages, the middle-managers of industry and media flatten every backbreaking schlub into an old salt with a clever nickname, and then attempt to jettison their workplace.
What occurred to me in reading the article was: I don’t understand why it has to move. Isn’t it the perfect definition of mixed use? Hardly anyone is ever around to actually see it, it provides jobs, a reasonable service (being proximate to most of their important customers), and is centrally located (allowing only for its unique hours of operation). Most importantly, it makes Manhattan look like, well, Manhattan. The only shred of authenticity in the abysmal failure that is the South Street Seaport, what kind of renaissance are we to expect once it’s gone? An additional outpost for Lids? There are the standard complaints: noise, mob influence, but mostly the smell. Ooh, the smell of fish. Strange thing, that, right next to the ocean. Yes, it can be gamey in places, but I regularly walk and jog that route, and once the market goes, they aren’t going to remove the pier currently operated by the sanitation department, and I’ve gone by trash compactors at the housing complexes that line South Street and there’s no lack of competition there for the aromatic. And I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but the smell of offal (and I’m not talking C-List models and IB-guys) hasn’t tempered the wild success of the other major food market/entertainment destination in the city.
You can’t manufacture scenes, especially in New York. Times’ Square worked because it was a destination that simply had all the culture scrubbed away. The South Street Seaport was never a logical tourist locale, and whatever Rouse thinks they are good at, they aren’t good at it here. If it weren’t for the fish market, most of us would probably forget that it is even there.
I’ve never been to the fish market. I probably never will, even if it doesn’t move next week. But that’s because I wouldn’t do much besides gawk and hope to see some bit of local color myself. I don’t need that any more than those who actually do work there. Because it’s not a Disney ride, but people trying to hold down a job, pay the mortgage, and not get a crippling disability in the course of carrying around frozen hunks of fish. But it is more of what we think of our town than any sanitized corporate sports bar experience, and I don’t understand the urgency to blot it out.
Vote or Walk.
It seemed to me that you could barely tell there was an election going on. Turns out most people think the Bloomberg campaign’s ubiquity has crossed from being vaguely unseemly to gratuitous in its disproportionate advantage. I’m not one of those people, but only because I don’t know what they are talking about. Likely the evidence is broadcast television, but I’m one of those superior liberal types that doesn’t have one, so until the news articles started appearing about the discrepancy, I was under the impression that no one even noticed there was an election upcoming.
With some reports indicating a 30 percent gap between the candidates, it could be argued that there isn’t. Since this is concise operation, there is little need for the formalities of an endorsement: I’m voting for Bloomberg, on the Independence line (in and of itself a challenging decision, but recent efforts at the state level to remove the ‘colorful’ Fulani faction should attenuate these concerns somewhat). It’s hard to draw apples-to-apples comparisons between the candidates. Borough President is a manifestly different role in the city from other positions of power (Council Speaker, Mayor, etc.). Ferrer, to his credit, toes an impressive line when it comes to ‘traditional’ liberal causes. His speech on housing is an impressive outline of issues facing the city, and it is filled with commitments to respond. But his criticisms of Bloomberg are a little over-drawn (the Mayor committed to 65,000 new units in five years; 40% of the way, he has delivered only 20% of the units — a gap possibly a result of the ramp-up to getting projects on line, and resulting in the bulk coming in later years), and he isn’t actually promising much more (his 175,000 number is drawn from both new projects and protecting existing programs — which Bloomberg is committed to as well). But it’s pretty easy to look good on housing; the situation is so abysmal, you can manufacture talking points of the air, and they all look good. So what are some of the other issues that this site focuses on where one might find demonstrable differences between the two? There has been plenty of discussion and criticism of the Mayor regarding large-scale development in the city. There is little to be found of Bloomberg’s excellence in delegation and bureaucratic wrangling when it comes to city planning, the appointment of Amanda Burden notwithstanding. The Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards proposals, while nominally the work of the MTA, are clearly identified with the Mayor, and have next to no vision beyond bland, large-scale developer-friendly lots and prototypes. A likely defensive need to pander made Bloomberg suddenly reverse his position on the Cross-Harbor Tunnel project. The brightest spot of late, coming out in favor removing Silverstein from the WTC rebuilding process, backfired because it was politically naïve (the centerpiece of his alternative — housing — is next to impossible under current conditions). So are we to conclude that Bloomberg can only hit sour notes when he reaches for the crescendo? Maybe, maybe not. The smoking ban is one of the most dramatic public life policy decisions to happen in a generation. Even though he hasn’t done anything particularly positive for nightlife culture, there is a palpable détente. And Bloomberg is an ardent supporter of the arts. While none of these positions are particularly progressive, they are also a welcome revision from the previous administration. Bloomberg the bureaucrat would tell you we aren’t out of the woods yet. We are still decades from resolving long-term pension obligations (and that doesn’t mean jettisoning our duties to public employees, but instead finding ways to make the system sustainable, likely through defined contribution plans, not defined benefits, which will have everyone working in this town in ten years wanting to scrap the whole system), burdened by massive mandates for health-care, and have an increasingly monolithic economic base. None of these make for exciting policy speeches, and the attention they require leave you open to attacks of being unsympathetic to the difficulties of the working class or worse. I can’t provide any masterstroke of logic. But in a town where every public position is for the taking by Democrats, that they haven’t fielded an inspiring candidate is no different than the far-left argument against Al Gore (that if you couldn’t handily find a way to beat a favored son of Texas who managed to lose money in the oil business, you deserve whatever you get). Perhaps that sense of entitlement is what led us to where we are today: making pragmatic decisions that rankle the sense that we shouldn’t suffer excuses or balkanized petty chiefs. But whatever you do, make sure to vote, and make sure to support the MTA. The MTA is a stupendously mismanaged entity much of the time, but withholding funding won’t resolve that problem. Reserve that anger for the next governor’s election. Vote Yes on 2. Yes on 2. Yes on 2. Second Avenue Subway=2 (more or less, but think “Two for Two”). Yes. Do it.